Evening Brief: Trudeau devising a new game plan?

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The Lead

The fallout from the resignation of the second cabinet minister because of the SNC-Lavalin scandal continued on Tuesday, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelling a planned visit to Regina in favour of private meetings in the nation’s capital.

Trudeau, though, still appeared at a planned armchair discussion at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada mining and mineral exploration conference Tuesday morning in Toronto. He arrived in the city Monday afternoon and addressed supporters later that night at an event hall in Toronto’s Greektown — his full remarks on Jane Philpott’s resignation can be found here.

The CBC is reporting that Trudeau had no warning before Philpott resigned and is now considering showing some “contrition” in how his office conducted itself in lobbying for the deferred prosecution agreement for SNC-Lavalin.

Trudeau’s public itinerary for Wednesday has nothing but private meetings in Ottawa.

In a 2017 letter, SNC-Lavalin CEO Neil Bruce advised Ottawa to change its anti-corruption rules as “expeditiously as possible,” The Canadian Press reports. The letter was sent to Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough on Oct. 13, 2017, but Bruce sent copies to seven other cabinet ministers. He also attached his company’s official submission for consultations on changes to the government’s “integrity regime” and the potential creation of a deferred prosecution agreement or remediation agreement.

Perhaps most worrisome, though, the poll reportedly found the Liberals trailing the Tories by 20 points in the seat-rich 905 region surrounding Toronto. Elections are often won and lost in this area in Canada.

A Liberal MP who has repeatedly called for more transparency around the SNC-Lavalin affair says he still has confidence in the government but it needs to pull back the curtain that it has kept over the scandal.

Wayne Long, who voted for an NDP motion for a public inquiry into the controversy and has consistently called for the House Justice committee to expand its own study, said more transparency from the government at the beginning would have left the Liberals in a better spot than they are now.

“I think there’s a lot of people saying now that if we had been more open and transparent from the start, one could argue that we may not be in the situation we’re in,” he told iPolitics in an interview on Tuesday. Charlie Pinkerton has this story.

From one controversy to another, the Ford government in Ontario continues to grapple with accusations of interfering in the appointment of the next commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police.

On Monday, deputy OPP commissioner Brad Blair was turfed from his job, a decision the Tories say was made by public service leadership, not the cabinet. Later that day, Blair submitted an affidavit in court saying his termination shows that he was fired because he publicly raised concerns about the appointment of Ford family friend Ron Taverner as OPP commissioner.

“It is patently clear to me that this is reprisal and an attempt to muzzle me,” he wrote in the court document, obtained by iPolitics on Tuesday. Marieke Walsh has the latest.

An iPolitics assessment has the NDP trailing the Green Party in nominated candidates for this year’s federal election. Despite Jagmeet Singh’s win in Burnaby South last week, his party lost a seat it previously held in another byelection that night and has since seen two of its more well-known and popular MPs — Nathan Cullen and Murray Rankin — announce they won’t seek re-election this year. Charlie Pinkerton has the full rundown.

Liberal MP Bill Casey is calling on Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale to order an external risk assessment of the Nova Scotia RCMP’s planned relocation of its emergency call centre from Truro to the Halifax area.

Casey shared with iPolitics the letter he wrote to the minister asking for an independent study of the move, which would place the two largest police emergency communications systems in Nova Scotia within a few blocks of each other in Dartmouth. The community is already home to the emergency call centre for the Halifax Regional Police.

“A failure in this one small area of Dartmouth will collapse the emergency communications for the province and leave the RCMP leadership with no place to function when they are needed the most,” he wrote to Goodale. Marco Vigliotti has more.

Richardson International, a major Canadian canola exporter, has had its registration to ship canola seeds to China revoked amid tensions between the two countries. A Chinese customs document dated March 1 says it has cancelled the Winnipeg-based company’s registration, CBC News reports.

The association representing independent Canadian producers was the most active group on the federal lobbying scene in January, as it renewed calls for policy-makers to find ways to ensure popular streaming services like Netflix are captured by existing broadcasting regulations.

The Canadian Media Producers Association filed 16 communication reports with the federal Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying in January, almost all detailing meetings at the end of the month that coincided with or immediately preceded its annual Prime Time in Ottawa conference that ran from Jan. 30 to Feb. 1.

Andrew Addison, CMPA’s vice-president of communications and marketing, said in an interview that the organization used the opportunity to discuss the ongoing review of the Broadcasting Act and Telecommunications Act, and its call for Ottawa to give the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission the tools to adequately regulate broadcasting in the “digital age.” Vigliotti also has this one.

Counter-terrorism police in the U.K. are investigating after three packages containing explosives were found at Heathrow Airport, London City Airport and Waterloo station, the BBC reports.

The Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command is treating the discovery of the small improvised explosive devices as a “linked series” and is “keeping an open mind” about motives. Irish police are assisting because the Heathrow and Waterloo packages had Republic of Ireland stamps. The device sent to Heathrow Airport caught fire when it was opened by staff.

Staying in the U.S., Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb will be resigning from the role after leading the agency’s crackdown on electronic cigarettes and the response to the opioid epidemic, Axios reports. The decision is reportedly due to the difficulty in commuting from Washington to Connecticut, where his three young children live.